Old English *motan, variable-force modality, and the presupposition of inevitable actualization

Bibliographic Data

ID7900350
AuthorsIgor Yanovich (0000-0002-6551-9239, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume92
Issue3
Pages489-521
Publication date2016-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLanguage (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-8507 • E-ISSN: 1535-0665
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/lan.2016.0045
OpenAlexW4232893680
LanguageEN
Citations received7

Old English *motan and Middle English *moten, the ancestors of modern must, are commonly described as ambiguous between a possibility and a necessity reading. I argue instead that in the Alfredian Old English prose, *motan was a nonambiguous ‘variable-force’ modal, with the modal force different from both possibility and necessity. I propose that *motan's variable-force effect was due to the presupposition of a collapse between possibility and necessity. Informally, motan(p) presupposed ‘if p gets a chance to actualize, it will’. I then trace the development of *motan into a modal genuinely ambiguous between necessity and possibility in Early Middle English

American English · Epistemology · Linguistics · Mathematical analysis · Modal · Modality (human–computer interaction) · Presupposition · Reading (process) · Sociology · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Variable (mathematics) · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · History · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Linguistics and language evolution · Mathematics · Philosophy · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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